flow. Scale also gets deposited in

flow. Scale also gets deposited in down-hole pumps, tubing, casing
flow-lines, heater treaters, tanks and other production equipments
and facilities. The consequence could be production-equipment
failure, emergency shutdown, increased maintenance cost, and
overall decrease in production efficiency [1,7].
Due to all those issues, the oil industry is highly interested
in detecting the presence of scale in its equipment and also
in checking the efficiency of the scale inhibitors injected in the
systems.
From the economic point of view non-destructive testing
procedures appear to have particular promise in deposit evaluation.
Once a system is in place and functioning well, it is often
unwise to disrupt it by cutting or disassembling; experience has
shown that difficulties have arisen as a result of destructive
examinations. Another advantage is that non-destructive examination
can often be performed at convenient times and need not
necessarily result in the shutdown of operations.
The common methods for locating deposit problems in piping
involve tangential X-ray and gamma-ray radiography. Besides
detection, this technique allows for the approximate quantification
of the deposit layer, generating permanent records of the condition
of the equipment either in film or in digital images. Such
records can be used later on for monitoring while performing
future inspections.
However, radiography has a few disadvantages for usage in
industrial plants. Due to the high intensity and energy of the
sources used for the inspection, there is the need to isolate a large
area so as to protect people from the radiation generated during
the test. This has a negative operational impact, since all jobs